Month: April 2023

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

There is an interesting controversy that has erupted at the University of Pittsburgh after Dr. Gabby Yearwood, who teaches in both the anthropology and law schools, was asked by swimmer Riley Gaines if he could tell the gender of persons from skeletal remains.

He denied that that was possible despite the widely accepted ability to do so in his field. The answer may reflect the ongoing push in anthropology, discussed in an earlier blog column, to put an end to gender identifications. Some insist that anthropologists need to know how an ancient human may have chosen to identify themselves.

Yearwood reportedly was asked the question by Gaines, who achieved national notoriety in opposing the inclusion of transgender athletes like the University of Pennsylvania’s Lia Thomas in women competitions. 

Like J.K. Rowling who has raised concerns over the threat to feminist gains from some transgender policies, Gaines is now ostracized and often prevented from speaking at events.

To its credit, Pittsburgh refused to yield to demands to bar Gaines and others from speaking on campus. This controversy appears to have resulted during the event that many sought cancel.

Gaines asked Yearwood, “If you were to dig up two humans one hundred years from now, both man and woman, could you tell the difference, strictly off of bones?”

According to Fox, Yearwood answered “No!” and then took umbrage after the room erupted in laughter.

He reportedly reminded them that he was “the expert in the room” and asked “Have any of you been to anthropological sites? Have any of you studied biological anthropology? I’m just saying, I’ve got over 150 years of data, I’m just curious as to why I’m being laughed at. I have a PhD!”

The videos posted on Twitter only show the first part of that exchange.

Gaines reportedly responded that “Every single rational person knows the answer: men have narrower hips, their skulls are different, they have an extra rib, their femurs are longer, their jaws are different.”

When @Riley_Gaines_ asked University of Pittsburgh professor Gabby Yearwood if an archeologist could differentiate between two sets of bones as male and female, Professor Yearwood. who calls himself the “expert in the room,” answers “no” to which the entire audience laughed. pic.twitter.com/Ecxs1NMDTr

— Independent Women’s Forum (@IWF) March 30, 2023

One expert is quoted by the College Fix as disagreeing with Yearwood though offering a correction also to one of Gaines’ statements.

San José State University archaeology Professor Elizabeth Weiss said determining the sex of skeletal remains “is a critical skill in forensics and any diminishing of this skill will negatively impact criminal investigations, denying the victims and their families justice.” She added that “Riley Gaines is correct on many traits, but males do not have an extra rib. This myth comes from the Adam and Eve story.”

Schools like Boston University note that

“Sex is typically determined by the morphology (shape) of the pelvis or skull and long bone measurements. ‘However, many of the areas on the skeleton that are used for sex estimation may be missing or damaged due to trauma, poor preservation, animal scavenging and nature of the incident (explosive). Therefore, it is important to examine other areas of the skeleton that preserve well and are potentially sexually dimorphic (show differences between females and males),’ explained corresponding author Sean Tallman, PhD, RPA, assistant professor of anatomy and neurobiology.”

In fairness to Yearwood, experts have said that determining gender occurs along a spectrum of analysis because some women may easily be mistaken for men. Indeed, there was research showing an overcounting of male skeletons in research by famed anthropologist Aleš Hrdlička, who helped found the modern study of human bones and served as the first curator of physical anthropology at the U.S. National Museum.

This controversy is part of a wider debate unfolding on our campuses.

University of Kansas Associate Professor Jennifer Raff argued in a paper, “Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas,”  that there are “no neat divisions between physically or genetically ‘male’ or ‘female’ individuals.”  Her best selling book has been featured on various news outlets like MSNBC.

Raff is not alone. Graduate students like Emma Palladino have objected  that “the archaeologists who find your bones one day will assign you the same gender as you had at birth, so regardless of whether you transition, you can’t escape your assigned sex.”

Professors Elizabeth DiGangi of Binghamton University and Jonathan Bethard of the University of South Florida have also challenged the use of racial classifications in a study, objecting that “[a]ncestry estimation contributes to white supremacy.”  The authors write that “we use critical race theory to interrogate the approaches utilized to estimate ancestry to include a critique of the continued use of morphoscopic traits, and we assert that the practice of ancestry estimation contributes to white supremacy.”

It is not clear if this movement influenced Yearwood’s answer. He has been a leader in calling for “critical engagement” and “activist research” to change the field of anthropology.

Dr. Yearwood’s bio shows that he is widely published and known in his field.

“Gabby M.H. Yearwood is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology and Managing Faculty Director for the Center for Civil Rights and Racial Justice in the Law School at the University Pittsburgh. He is a socio-cultural anthropologist earning his Ph.D from the University of Texas at Austin in Anthropology focusing in Black Diaspora Studies and Masculinity. His research interests include the social constructions of race and racism, masculinity, gender, sex, Black Feminist and Black Queer theory, anthropology of sport and Black Diaspora. Dr. Yearwood holds a secondary appointment with the Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies Program at Pitt.  Dr. Yearwood is also a teaching member of the Pitt Prison Education Project.”

Among his courses is “Activist Anthropology” the description of which reads:

“[T]his course will teach students that ‘critical engagement brought about by activist research is both necessary and productive. Such research can contribute to transforming the discipline by addressing knowledge production and working to decolonize our research process. Rather than seeking to avoid or resolve the tensions inherent in anthropological research on human rights, activist research draws them to the fore, making them a productive part of the process. Finally, activist research allows us to merge cultural critique with political action to produce knowledge that is empirically grounded, theoretically valuable, and ethically viable.’ (Speed 2006). This course will teach students both the importance and value of conducting research that moves outside of the “ivory tower” of academia. “[A]ctivist scholars work in dialogue, collaboration, alliance with people who are struggling to better their lives; activist scholarship embodies a responsibility for results that these “allies” can recognize as their own, value in their own terms, and use as they see fit.” (Hale 2008) This course will explore major conceptual work on the role and ethical responsibility of anthropological research and social justice issues.”

The United States government has been selling bitcoin confiscated from the Silk Road case in 2013. 

As Turner Wright reports at CoinTelegraph.com, a March 31 filing with U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York regarding the sentencing of James Zhong stated U.S. government authorities had begun liquidating roughly 51,352 BTC seized in the Ulbricht case.

According to the filing, officials sold roughly 9,861 BTC for more than $215 million on March 14, leaving roughly 41,491 BTC.

“The Government understands [the seized Bitcoin] is expected to be liquidated in four more batches over the course of this calendar year,” said the court filing.

“The Government understands from IRS Criminal Investigation – Asset Recovery & Investigative Services that the second round of liquidation will not be sold prior to Zhong’s sentencing date.”

In November, Zhong pled guilty to wire fraud charges related to executing a scheme to steal Bitcoin from Silk Road in 2012. U.S. authorities seized more than 50,000 BTC – worth more than $3 billion at the time – from his Georgia home in November 2021. It was one of the largest crypto seizures by the government until the February 2022 recovery of roughly $3.6 billion connected to the 2016 Bitfinex hack.

The Silk Road marketplace, which has been defunct for 10 years, originally allowed users to buy and sell illicit goods, including weapons and stolen credit card information.

However, the marketplace also drew the attention of U.S. authorities, who arrested Ulbricht in 2013. He is currently serving two life sentences without the possibility of parole.

I was arrested at the age of 29 and today I turn 39. I’ve lost my 30s to prison.

During that time, I’ve done my best to learn from my mistakes, better myself, and help others do the same.

I hope someday I can make amends as a free man as well.

— Ross Ulbricht (@RealRossU) March 27, 2023

The price of BTC has had a volatile month, dipping below $20,000 on March 10 and moving above $29,000 on March 29. At the time of publication, BTC’s price was above $28,000.

While the government has been selling bitcoin, other institutions like MicroStrategy have been acquiring it.

👀

— Michael Saylor⚡️ (@saylor) March 31, 2023

Authored by Kevin Stocklin via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

In the midst of an ongoing lawsuit against the Biden administration alleging collaboration with social media companies to censor Americans, a new report has detailed the extent to which former Justice Department (DOJ) employees are now working at “Big Tech” firms.

The American Accountability Foundation (AAF) investigated the resumes of recent hires and found that more than 360 current employees of Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook/Meta are former DOJ employees. Likewise, more than 40 DOJ employees, many of them in senior roles, previously worked at Big Tech firms.

According to the report, since President Joe Biden took office, Google hired 40 former DOJ staffers, Amazon hired 61, Microsoft hired 26, and Meta hired 53.

While staff often move between government and the private sector, “this case is different because unlike government and industry moving expertise back and forth (knowledge about procurement rules for example) what we have seen moving back and forth between DOJ and tech is a shared political agenda, specifically to silence conservative voices,” Yitz Friedman, AAF communications manager, told The Epoch Times.

“Sadly, it is evidence that in the Big Tech community, corporate policy is the government’s policy.”

This concern is heightened by recent evidence of collaboration between the DOJ and Twitter to silence Americans, particularly regarding political speech.

After buying social media platform Twitter, Elon Musk released thousands of internal emails that allegedly showed collusion between Twitter and DOJ officials to censor speech, including banning a report by the New York Post before the 2020 election that reportedly incriminated then-candidate Joe Biden in illicit payments scandals.

‘Campaign of Public Threats’

The release of the “Twitter files” follows a lawsuit by Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry and former Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt that alleges illegal collusion between the Biden administration and Big Tech companies to suppress free speech.

In a November 2022 interview with The Epoch Times, Landry stated that, because of the First Amendment, “the government doesn’t have the ability to censor speech, especially political speech. And so they can’t go out there and force these companies [to do it].”

Plaintiffs in this case filed a 364-page “finding of fact” document showing a “campaign of public threats against social-media platforms to pressure them to censor more speech on social media.” This document will be discussed in a congressional hearing on March 30 on the “Weaponization of the Federal Government.”

Read more here…

The city of Boston’s Covid-19 vaccine mandate for city workers was legal, according to a March 30 ruling by the Massachusetts Supreme Court, after the city claimed that the ability to adequately combat the virus outweighed the risk of irreparable vaccine injuries to workers who were facing termination.

“The potential harm to the city and the public resulting from the spread of COVID-19 clearly outweighed the economic harm to the employees,” wrote Justice Elspeth Cypher in the ruling.

The 2021 mandate required proof of vaccination or weekly testing – the latter of which was dropped after the Omicron variant emerged. This prompted a challenge from unions which claimed that the city had not properly negotiated the change.

Boston Mayor Michelle Wu was under advisement from Dr. Bisola Ojikutu – who told the court that the update was necessary because testing was likely insufficient to combat COVID-19 despite the fact that the vaccine performed terribly against Omicron and its subvariants.

The new ruling supercedes and overturns a 2022 preliminary injunction.

Workers who failed to get a COVID-19 vaccine under the mandate faced repercussions, including termination. Unions asked for a preliminary injunction so workers could not be punished. Their bid was initially rejected, with a trial judge finding plaintiffs had not demonstrated irreparable harm absent an injunction. Massachusetts Appeals Court Judge Sabita Singh reversed that ruling, finding that workers faced “substantial harm” if the mandate was not blocked and that the city’s failure to negotiate the policy meant plaintiffs were likely to succeed.

Singh said the case differed from others because it implicated issues of “bodily integrity and self-determination.”

Singh “abused her discretion” in issuing the injunction, which remained in place until Thursday, the state’s top court said.

The harm the plaintiffs were facing is solely economic because “they could have continued to refuse to become vaccinated and instead challenged the decision both in court and before” the Commonwealth Employment Relations Board (CERB), the court said. -Epoch Times

“Given the unique circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic and its threat to the health and safety of the public, the decision to remove the testing alternative in the defendants’ COVID-19 policy constituted a nondelegable policy decision that could not be the subject of decision bargaining because any such requirement would have impinged directly on the defendants’ ability to provide essential public safety services to city residents,” reads the ruling.

Meanwhile, Boston recently agreed to drop the mandate for the plaintiffs, firefighters and superior officers because “the parties desire to resolve this matter without the expense and uncertainty of further litigation, and in promotion of harmonious labor relations between them,” according to the Boston Herald.

Sam Dillon, president of Boston Firefighters Local 718, told the Epoch Times: “I respect the Court’s decision to lift the injunction however I do not see it having any impact on our Union and members given the agreement we reached with the City in February.”

“The Court’s decision in no way impacts the recent agreement between Local 718 and the City, and the Covid-19 mandate remains unenforceable to the members of Local 718,” added Leah Barrault, who represented the plaintiffs in the case.

Authored by Roy Sebag via GoldMoney.com,

Refresh the Page and it’s Gone

On July 11, 2008, news broke out that California based IndyMac Bank suddenly failed and was to be shut down by banking regulators. Within minutes, thousands of bank depositors swarmed their local branches. A jarring video covering the event can still be viewed online. In it, a puzzled CBS news reporter approaches people queueing in the streets and asks them why they have showed up en masse to withdraw their funds from the bank.

The reporter approaches Lisa Hester Lerner, a female depositor who rushed to the scene after having discovered that everything above the insured limit in her online bank account had disappeared. She had this to say: “I think it’s mass hysteria. I think this is similar to what happened in the Great Depression. And I think that everyone wants their money, and they want to touch it and hold it and see it.”

Nearly fifteen years after the 2008 financial crisis, retail bank depositors have been plunged into a renewed sense of fear as bank runs abound from Silicon Valley to Manhattan to Zurich. Last week, Silicon Valley Bank, Silvergate and Signature Bank New York failed. The US Treasury, FDIC, and the Federal Reserve were forced to step in by providing an “emergency rescue” package that will guarantee as much as $400 billion of uninsured deposits. Over the weekend, the Swiss government forced a merger of Credit Suisse with UBS by changing the country’s laws in an effort to halt a bank run on the 166-year-old institution.

These privileged bailouts, which were not offered to those unfortunate IndyMac depositors in 2008, have rightfully evoked a conversation about moral hazard which is eerily reminiscent to the Occupy Wall Street movement years ago. While the financial conditions which led to the recent bank runs are in some ways very different to the conditions underlying the start of the 2008 financial crisis, many in the public square today feel that much of the underlying anxiety, anger, and confusion from that defining period of a generation has never really disappeared.  

Nassim Taleb, the author of the bestselling book The Black Swan is one of those people. According to Taleb, the 2008-9 bailouts were a “blatant case of corporate socialism and a reward to an industry whose managers are stopped out by taxpayers”.

Taleb continued: “Remember that bailouts come with printed money, which effectively deflate the wages of the middle class.”

It was not surprising then to see Taleb criticize the recent bailouts with similar perspicuity. Last week he blamed venture capitalists for taking inordinate risk by banking with Silicon Valley Bank, causing a bank run when they noticed the institution was on the brink of insolvency, and then begging the government for bailouts when they realized they would be unable to withdraw their uninsured deposits in time. “They are all libertarians until they are hit by higher interest rates,” he concluded.  

In an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal, Vivek Ramaswamy, the entrepreneur turned US 2024 Presidential Candidate, similarly blasted the recent bailouts. He argued that the issues at the banks were a “simple case of bad risk management”, and that they were, at best, a case of incompetence, or at worst, a case of moral hazard where bank executives took on excessive risks with the knowledge that a bailout would materialize in the case of failure. According to Ramaswamy, Silicon Valley Bank’s “real hedge was to curry favour with the Biden administration.” 

On the other side of the debate were three notable voices: David Sacks and Gary Tan, both venture capitalists based in Silicon Valley, and Bill Ackman, the New York based hedge fund manager. Over the weekend of March 10, 2023, these three flooded social media with hysterical warnings about the risks to society and the need for the government to step in before markets opened on Monday. Some commentators have observed how these sensational appeals for government action placed a great deal of political pressure on the Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve William Powell to take radical action, which of course, they did. Tan, went so far as arguing that this was “an extinction level event” that demanded an urgent solution.

In David Sacks’ own words: “The only reason people are being stubborn about this point is because Silicon Valley Bank has the name Silicon Valley in it. If this was a farmers’ bank and it was 40,000 farms, small business farms that were on the hook, everybody would understand. The arguments being made would be: we can’t let 40,000 farms go out of business. They didn’t do anything wrong. They just trusted when they put their money in a bank that it was safe.”

Bill Ackman, echoing Sacks, said that the government did not “bailout” Silicon Valley Bank because, unlike in the 2008 financial crisis, the government did not inject taxpayer money into the banks.

To his mind, the government “did the right thing for the country.”

The position advanced by Sacks and Tan is patently false. As Roger Lowenstein pointed out last week in his own opinion piece for the NY Times: “In the rescue of Silicon Valley Bank on Friday and of Signature Bank in New York two days later, the FDIC overtly ignored the cap and rescued all depositors, irrespective of size. This is a breathtaking leap.” In response to Ackman’s line of thinking, Lowenstein had this to say:

“Federal officials have seized on a technicality to claim that it is not a bailout…. However, in the sense that banking customers are a pretty big group, the ‘public’ will be affected. Once you take risk out of a part of a bank’s operations, it is hard to let market principles govern the rest… the bailout does nothing to address the condition that fostered financial instability: inflation. It may even exacerbate it.”

While the discourse is certainly polarized, with those firmly in the bailout camp and others firmly opposed, it seems that both sides are swiftly focusing on surface level talking points. The conversation, it seems, is being positioned in the financial media and from the institutional class in the following way: The recent bank runs have been caused by price declines from mostly safe assets. Therefore, monetary authorities need to focus on low contagion risk, decisive banking facilities to limit systemic damage, and the need to improve the health of bank balance sheets.

The party lines will tow their diagnoses and purported cures. But isn’t there a bigger problem?

Peering deeper into the cultural tension and anxiety, what feels different for many of the Occupy generation, and what you likely won’t hear in much of the financial media, is not that this was another unexpected bank crisis and bailout, but that an entire, mostly unvoiced group of people find both the bank failure and the bailout entirely predictable. But they feel they have no alternative in the matter, or even a voice. This is just the way the system is.

These are people like Lisa Hester Lerner who just want to touch, hold, and see their money. This desire for a tangible solution reflects the real tension that many of us feel to be at the heart of things: that our abstract financial system is out of balance. And out of balance with what? With nature itself.

The ideal relationship between humans and nature is obvious enough. We work with the land, forage for food, till the soil, produce crops, and after the laborious harvest season, we enjoy the fruits of the land, and conserve the surplus for the winter months. Unexpected calamities may occur – a drought, a rough season, a case of blight or disease – but, sure enough, with care and patience, the cycle reassumes its course, and we reap what we sow in time.

Most of us today don’t work with nature anymore. We go to offices, sit at desks, take home paychecks, feed our families and pay the bills, and hopefully come away with something at the end of the month to put away into the family nest egg. Yet the basic principle still stands: it is entirely natural for us to store away a portion of the harvest into “savings” and conserve it for the colder seasons.

But the human institution today is no longer harmonious with the natural economy. The money in the paycheck is not as real as the food we harvest and eat. This is because our modern society has been collectively systematized into the abstract. Your savings is no longer grain in a storehouse, nor is it silver in a purse or gold in a vault – it’s a number on the screen of a bank’s website. Refresh the page and it may be gone.

This isn’t populist anger. It is plain enough that the abstract system is already out of balance with the natural economy. It speaks an entirely different language. Instead of a physical reward, earners are given a nominal sum – and you better hope that sum isn’t capped at a wage while the government’s pool of printed money drowns its real purchasing power. Instead of savings that are concrete and ready-to-hand for the future, savers are forced to put away their time and labour into the black hole of risk otherwise known as a bank.

Throughout history, great civilizations collapse when human institutions mistake themselves to be unaccountable to any objective standard of measure and reward, or when they think themselves to float above the tides of nature. To believe that we are exempt from this universal law is either a sign of great imprudence or perilous maleficence.

In my book, The Natural Order of Money, I argue that there are two economies: the real economy and the service economy. The role of money is to balance the relationship between these two sectors in relation to our shared environment of the natural world. My conclusion is that only natural money can achieve this function.

A bank run can and will take place even if natural money is used, but there is a great distinction in the possible actions available to the government. A modern bank run predicated on fiat money, as we have seen by the recent bailouts, no longer provides a “check” on the system. Rather, it consolidates the system into smaller but more powerful central banking institutions. While central banks swiftly print new money to provide liquidity to the banks facing runs, this digital money is just as swiftly withdrawn from the failing bank into a larger, systemically important bank, or instead into a government bond. In other words, the bailouts reinforce the system itself by socializing the failure and privatizing the gains.

With natural money, a bank run has to be respected, it cannot be papered over by devaluing the purchasing power of society’s savers. This in turn would allow the government and central banks to actually complete the task they set out for themselves last year, which was supposed to be to fight inflation, not print more currency.

When central banks are compelled by social media trending hashtags and evanescent hysteria to bailout failed banks, they fail in their primary duty to society as the privileged administrators of money as a social contract. The result of this folly is another deferral of the inevitable re-balancing of our abstract economies with the natural world.

China has made good on its threats vowing retaliation for Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen’s tour of the US and Central American allies, now a few days in. On Saturday the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) sent 18 aircraft and four naval vessels toward the self-ruled island.

Tsai first landed in New York on Wednesday, and is currently in Central America – specifically Guatemala and Belize, after which she’s expected in L.A. for a planned meeting with US House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. The McCarthy visit may prove the most controversial part of her trip.

Beijing warned of an even greater response should the Taiwanese leader go through with the McCarthy meeting. Only has 13 countries across the globe currently keep official diplomatic ties with Taiwan.

While PLA violations of Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone, and even the Taiwan Strait median line have been a weekly occurrences for much of the past year or more, the past days have seen China ramp up the flights.

Reuters reported Friday that “Nine Chinese aircraft crossed the Taiwan Strait’s median line on Friday carrying out combat readiness patrols, Taiwan’s defense ministry said, days after Beijing threatened retaliation if President Tsai Ing-wen meets U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.”

The Taiwan defense ministry statement said it has deployed in own jets and ships to monitor the PLA movements, however, sought to caution that it’s “not escalating conflicts or causing disputes” with China.

“The communist military’s deployment of forces deliberately created tension in the Taiwan Strait, not only undermining peace and stability, but also has a negative impact on regional security and economic development,” it added, condemning “such irrational actions”.

HAPPENING NOW: Taiwan President Tsai @iingwen arrives in Guatemala. Taiwan and Guatemala have been allies since 1960, and maintain robust commercial and trade ties. pic.twitter.com/uDRlNYzYrC

— TaiwanPlus (@taiwanplusnews) March 31, 2023

It must be recalled that China’s PLA military had launched its largest-ever ‘encircling’ live-fire exercises around Taiwan when then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited the island in August. Likely ahead of April 5, when Tsai is expected to meet the Republican House Speaker, China will ratchet its muscle-flexing around the self-ruled island even more.

Authored by Bruce Abramson via RealClearPolitics.com,

The First Amendment is at a critical juncture. Recent congressional hearings on the Twitter Files brought the matter into full public view. Freedom of speech and of the press are hanging by a precarious thread. Do we want a future in which information flows freely, or one in which an information elite controls those flows “for our own good?” The choices we make over the next few years will determine which of those futures we get.

It’s tragic that we have let the problem reach this dangerous state. What heightens the tragedy, however, is that the war against America’s most cherished freedoms was predictable and preventable. If those of us who value freedom want to win, we’re going to need a strategy grounded in a clear understanding of what’s happening and why.

The Twitter Files story is shocking. Allegations that big tech and social media manipulate information have been around for as long as we’ve had tech and social media companies. Allegations of bias among the mainstream media are even older. In recent years, however, both the allegations and the supporting evidence have ratcheted upward to unprecedented levels.

When Elon Musk acquired Twitter, he opened his company’s internal archives to scrutiny. He assembled a team of journalists with a curious pedigree: registered Democrats with a distaste for Donald Trump and his supporters, whose track records skewed considerably left of center, and whose recent work has demonstrated deep concern about the politicization of journalism.

Musk gave them unfettered access. They found a deep, broad, and disturbing pattern of collaboration between big government and big tech designed to promote “official stories” on multiple issues, throttle competing theories and arguments, and sanction those who dared to question government propaganda.

When two of those journalists – Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger – testified before Congress, their Democratic inquisitors sought to belittle their credentials, question their motives, and tar them as part of some Republican-funded, far-right conspiracy. The still-left-leaning journalists are trying to absorb their shock at the depths to which the formerly civil-libertarian left has fallen.

Far from shocking, however, that fall was predictable – and predicted. In 2001, amidst the public disgust with tech companies following the collapse of the dotcom bubble, I set out to make sense of life during the transition from the late industrial age to the early information age. I analyzed what I called the first four front-page stories of the information age: the dotcom bubble, the Microsoft antitrust trial, the rise of open-source software, and the Napster-driven wars over digital music. Contrary to popular opinion of the time, I believed that these stories were far from distinct. I saw them as four manifestations of a single underlying phenomenon. My goal was to understand that phenomenon.

I found it. It appeared most clearly in the digital music arena, but it ran through all four stories – and through much that has happened since. It appears just as clearly in today’s war on free speech. It involves an entirely predictable pattern of opportunity, action, and reaction.

The starting point is digitization and quantification. The Internet changed the economics of information. Throughout human history, information was scarce, hard to acquire, and expensive to process. Skilled professionals – spies, scholars, lawyers, accountants, clerics, doctors – could command a premium for their knowledge. When the Internet went public, anything that could be digitized and quantified suddenly flowed freely. Information was there for the asking. The premium shifted to filtering – the ability to discard unwanted information and arrange what remained.

Economic shifts generate massive opportunities for creative, entrepreneurial people and bring glorious benefits to millions of consumers. The Internet was no exception in this regard, and neither was the predictable backlash against it. Anything that benefits new businesses and empowers consumers is a warning shot across the bow of powerful incumbents who’d grown accustomed to serving those consumers in a predictable, profitable, manner.

In the music industry, anything that let individual consumers share digital music files reduced the revenues, profits, power, and control of record labels. Pre-digitization, these powerful incumbents determined what music got recorded and how it was packaged, distributed, presented, and priced. It was a comfortable business model that gave us the music industry “as we knew it.” The Internet undermined it entirely.

Powerful incumbents never fade quietly into the night when challenged. They fight, using whatever weapons they can muster. In our society, the most effective ways to undermine new technological and economic opportunities tend to lie in law, regulation, and public policy. The record labels fought – largely successfully – to apply and reinterpret existing laws and to change laws in ways favorable to their interests.

There’s the pattern: Technology creates opportunities. New businesses exploit those opportunities. Consumers benefit. Powerful incumbents fear their loss of control. Threatened incumbents seek allies in government. Government changes laws and regulations to protect incumbent interests. Media campaigns “educate” the public on the merits of the new policies. The new laws ensure that the next wave of technological change runs largely through the powerful incumbents, rather than against them.

By 2003, I had distilled this pattern, showed numerous ways that it had already unfolded, predicted that it would soon hit parts of our economy and our lives far more significant than the music industry, and suggested some ways that we might prepare ourselves for the coming battles.

It took another two years to get my analysis published. It went largely unnoticed. Twelve years later, then-Senator Ben Sasse described the ways that this pattern had forever disrupted the dynamics of employment. This, too, went largely unnoticed.

Today, we see that disruptive pattern threatening the most basic of our civil liberties. Its manifestation in the arenas of speech, propaganda, and censorship is clear. Consider how each step in the process I identified above has played out here:

• Technology creates opportunities. The Internet opened entirely new vistas for the creation and exchange of ideas, information, theories, opinions, propaganda, and outright lies.

• New businesses exploit those opportunities. The companies founded since 1995 that created and control the world’s most important conduits for information have joined the ranks of history’s most powerful entities.

• Consumers benefit. The centrality of these communication systems to our lives (for better or for worse) proves that they confer real value.

• Powerful incumbents fear their loss of control. The twin political shocks of 2016 – Brexit and Donald Trump – highlighted the extent to which official channels had lost control of the narrative. With the entirety of elite media, government, big business, and the intelligentsia aligned behind Remain and Hillary, the newly empowered masses understood – for the first time – that there were viable alternatives to the official story.

• Threatened incumbents seek allies in government. A coalition of elite forces assembled quickly, laser-focused on stomping out the populist threat. Masses empowered to conduct their own analyses, draw their own conclusions, and share their opinions among themselves threatened the stability of the power structure “as we know it.”

• Government changes laws and regulations to protect incumbent interests. Prior to Musk’s Twitter, the entirety of Silicon Valley committed itself to “protecting” the public from “disinformation,” roughly defined as anything that threatened to undermine an official, sanctioned narrative. Allies throughout the administrative state, Congress, and the Biden White House are working to embed those “protections” in law.

• Media campaigns “educate” the public on the merits of the new policies. The same mainstream media that vilified Napster, Grokster, and Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file sharing is now working to turn public opinion against the evil purveyors of alleged “disinformation.”

• The new laws ensure that the next wave of technological change runs largely through the powerful incumbents, rather than against them. We’re now entering the stage in which censoring technologies provide strong, effective, and legally mandated protection against anything that runs against the “consensus” of government propaganda or enlightened elite opinion.

The backlash is nearing its last stages. We’re rapidly heading towards locking in a technological, economic, and legal regime of information control, censorship, surveillance, and vilification.

That’s the predictable pattern. That’s the threat. That’s the precipice on which we now stand. We’re on the verge of deciding whether we want to restore information monopoly and dominance to a powerful elite, or reverse the trajectory of recent law, regulation, and public policy to enshrine an architecture of open discourse.

Will the information age be an era of informed, empowered citizens – or an era of a dominant, information-controlling elite? Stay tuned. That’s the question we need to answer.

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Bruce Abramson, PhD, JD, is a principal at JBB&A Strategies and B2 Strategic, a director of the American Center for Education and Knowledge, and author of the forthcoming book “The New Civil War: Exposing Elites, Fighting Utopian Leftism, and Restoring America” (RealClear Publishing, 2021).

Inflation is showing up just about everywhere, but it’s becoming even more prominent and noticeable at the nation’s Ivy League universities where, according to a new report from Bloomberg, prices for tuition are now approaching $90,000.

Prestigious universities like Yale, Dartmouth and Brown have raised tuition between 4% and 5%, the report notes, even as full costs for many of these colleges are already “well into the $80,000” range. This means a full, four year education costs over $300,000 in many cases.

As Bloomberg note, the cost of attending a university like Brown is now, on a per year basis, “well above what the typical US household earns”. This means that financial aid must make up the difference in many cases.

Beth Akers, an economist who focuses on higher education, told Bloomberg: “At some point, that math stops working out. We get to a place where these degrees are just no longer worth it.”

The University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth College, Columbia University and Brown University all have price tags over $80,000 per year, as of 2022. Yale breached this mark last academic year, as well. But despite the price hikes, demand has not yet showed signs of waning. 

In addition to trying to get the most from federal subsidies (“at least 50% of students receive some sort of financial aid,” the report says), universities are also facing a rise in costs, just like every other industry over the last 18 months. The cost of running a college is up 5.2% in fiscal 2022, Bloomberg reported. This figure marks the largest rise since 2001. 

Per the report, here are the costs for attending some of the most well known Ivy League schools:

• Brown Cost of Attendance: $84,828
• Cornell Cost of Attendance: $84,568 
• U Penn Cost of Attendance: $84,570
• Dartmouth Cost of Attendance: $84,300
• Yale Cost of Attendance: $83,880
• Duke Cost of Attendance: $83,263
• Stanford Cost of Attendance: $82,406
• Columbia Cost of Attendance: $81,680
• MIT Cost of Attendance: $79,546
• Harvard Cost of Attendance: $76,763
• Princeton Cost of Attendance: $76,040 

In most cases, more than 40% of students receive some form of financial aid. At schools like Stanford and Princeton, that number is between 60% and 70% of all students. 

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

Below is my column in Fox.com on the Trump indictment. There is a report of 34 counts against former President Donald Trump, which may be count stacking based on individual payments or documents.

We will have to wait to see.

In the meantime, the prosecution came about in the most overtly political way from Bragg campaigning on charging Trump to a public pressure campaign to indict from his former lead prosecutor.

Here is the column:

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has finally made history. He has indicted former President Donald Trump as part of an investigation, possibly for hush money payments. We are all waiting to see the text of the indictment to confirm the basis for this unprecedented act. But history in this case — and in this country — is not on Bragg’s side.

The only crime that has been discussed in this case is an unprecedented attempt to revive a misdemeanor for falsifying business documents that expired years ago. If that is still the basis of Thursday’s indictment, Bragg could not have raised a weaker basis to prosecute a former president. If reports are accurate, he may attempt to “bootstrap” the misdemeanor into a felony (and longer statute of limitations) by alleging an effort to evade federal election charges.

While Trump will be the first former president indicted, he will not be the last if that is the standard for prosecution.

It is still hard to believe that Bragg would primarily proceed on such a basis. There have been no other crimes discussed over months, but we will have to wait to read the indictment to confirm the grounds.

What we do know is the checkered history leading to this moment.

The Justice Department itself declined to prosecute the federal election claim against Trump.

There was ample reason to decline.

The Justice Department went down this road before and it did not go well. They tried to prosecute former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards on stronger grounds (which I also criticized) and failed. In that case, campaign officials and donors were directly involved in covering up an affair that produced a child.

At the time, Edwards’ wife was suffering from cancer. The prosecution still collapsed. The reason is that you need to show the sole purpose for paying hush money in such a scandal. For any married man, let alone a celebrity, there are various reasons to want to bury a sexual scandal.

For Trump, there was an upcoming election but he was also a married man allegedly involved in an affair with a porn star. He was also a television celebrity who is subject to the standard “morals clause” that’s triggered by criminal conduct or conduct that brings “public disrepute, scandal, or embarrassment.” These clauses are written broadly to protect the news organizations and their “brand.”

Various presidents from Warren Harding to Bill Clinton have been involved in efforts to hush up affairs. They also had different reasons for burying such scandals, including politics. However, scandals are messy matters with a complex set of motivations. Showing that Trump only acted with the future election in mind — rather than his current marriage or television contracts — is implausible. That was likely the same calculus made by the Justice Department.

That is also why the use of the “bootstrapping” theory as the primary charge would be an indictment of the prosecution and its own conduct. The office has already been tarnished by the conduct of the prosecutors who pushed this theory.

When Bragg initially balked at this theory and stopped the investigation, two prosecutors, Carey R. Dunne and Mark F. Pomerantz, resigned from the Manhattan DA’s office. Pomerantz then did something that some of us view as a highly unprofessional and improper act. He published a book on the case against Trump — a person who was still under investigation and not charged, let alone convicted, of any crime.

It worked. Bragg ran on his pledge to bag Trump and Pomerantz ramped up the political base to demand an indictment for a crime. It really did not matter what that crime might be.

While other crimes have not been discussed in leaks or coverage for months, it is always possible that Bragg charged Trump on something other than the state/federal hybrid issue in his indictment. There could be other business or tax record charges linked to banks or taxes. Ironically, the bank and tax fraud issues were also a focus of the Justice Department, which again did not charge on those theories. Moreover, Bragg could face the same statute of limitation concerns on some of the issues previously investigated by the Justice Department.

Finally, Bragg could stack multiple falsification claims to ramp up the indictment. There are reports of 34 counts of business record falsification. But multiplying a flawed theory 34 times does not make it 34 times stronger. Serial repetition is no substitute for viable criminal charges.

Bragg could have something more than the anemic bootstrapping theory — and it would be more defensible. Conversely, if Bragg moves primarily on that theory, the Democrats are inviting a race to the bottom in political prosecutions. That is something that we have been able to largely avoid in this country.

Bragg had a choice to make. He cannot be the defender of the rule of law if he is using the legal process for political purposes. That is what would be involved in a formal accusation based largely on the bootstrap theory. The underlying misdemeanor could pale in comparison to the means being used to prosecute it.

We have already watched the unseemly display of Bragg’s former lead prosecutor in publishing a book and publicly calling for charges during an ongoing investigation.

Proceeding solely on the bootstrap theory would be a singularly ignoble moment for the Manhattan District Attorney.

What is clear is that whatever comes out of that gate next week, it will not just be Trump who will face the judgment of history.

At the beginning of this year, we checked out exhibits of defense firms showing off their cutting-edge weapons at the 45th SHOT Show at the Venetian Expo and Caesars Forum in Las Vegas (read: here & here). Over the years, what has captured our attention are the advanced weapons that could potentially be employed by Tier 1 special ops personnel in the next major conflict. 

The latest weapon of war that special ops might be adding to their arsenal is a new unmanned aerial delivery system for quick resupply of friendly forces on the frontlines. 

In February, the 1st Special Forces Group (Airborne) successfully tested Defense Department contractor Silent Arrow’s GD-2000 glider, a disposable autonomous aircraft that can haul upwards of 1,500 pounds of gear and equipment at a range of up to 40 miles, at the Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona. 

Traditional supply delivery systems can be bulky and involve a parachute with a very limited distance. The ability of the autonomous glider to maneuver through the air will allow Tier 1 operators to receive critical supplies in heavily contested warzones. 

“What this glider does is give us a much greater [travel distance] and a much greater glide ratio into a target.

“If we are able to get [the glider] up to 40,000 feet we’re looking at [travel distances] in excess of 25 to 30 miles. That’s a pretty unique capability and not matched by anything we currently have,” said a Special Forces detachment commander whose team tested the glider.

During the successful field training exercise at Yuma Proving Grounds, the GD-2000 with 1,000 pounds of supplies was airdropped from an Alenia C-27J Spartan military transport plane, and it glided to within 30 meters of its intended target. 

The autonomous glider expands the military’s capability to airdrop supplies while in international air space into heavily contested areas. It seems plausible that the Pentagon is already considering this system for deployment in Ukraine.